On the Interaction between Object Recognition and Colour Constancy

In this paper we investigate some aspects of the interaction between colour constancy and object recognition. We demonstrate that even under severe changes of illumination, many objects are reliably recognised if relying only on geometry and on invariant representation of local colour appearance. We feel that colour constancy as a preprocessing step of an object recognition algorithm is important only in cases when colour is major (or the only available) clue for object discrimination. We also show that successful object recognition allows for ”colour constancy by recognition” – an approach where the global photometric transformation is estimated from locally corresponding image patches